Don Graves, The Hamilton Spectator: “A deftly conceived, multilayered story told with a compassionate voice…The plot leads you to a conclusion with skillfully planted clues, employs a sense of the setting so real that the reader feels a part of the place and uses dialogue that reveals the minds and souls of the characters in it. Victim will linger in your mind long after you’ve closed the book…a gifted piece of writing.”

Rosemary Aubert, author of the Ellis Portal mystery series: “VICTIM, by Catherine Astolfo, is an enjoyable, engaging read—a fine book full of suspense with lively, and intriguing characters. This is good, strong, clear writing that keeps the reader waiting for more. Along with a complex mystery, there’s even a few sensual love scenes and a darling dog! Best of all—the mystery at the heart of this story seamlessly combines Aboriginal myths and legends with a precise rendering of small-town Canadian manners and mores. VICTIM is original, sensitive and satisfying.”

AUTHOR BIO:
Catherine is a past President of Crime Writers of Canada and a Derrick Murdoch Award winner (2012). She was a Zonta Club 2012 Nominee for Women of Achievement.
Writing is Catherine’s passion. She can recall inventing fantasy stories for her classmates in Grade Three. Her short stories and poems have been published in a number of literary Canadian presses. In 2005, she won a Brampton Arts Award. Her short stories won the Bloody Words Short Story Award (second and first) in 2009 and 2010. She won the prestigious Arthur Ellis Best Short Crime Story Award in 2012.

Catherine’s novel series, The Emily Taylor Mysteries, are published by Imajin Books and are optioned for film by Sisbro & Co. Inc. Visit Catherine at www.catherineastolfo.com.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT:
Daphne Wentworth is almost seventeen, definitely a red head, and most likely the tallest girl in her class, which is awkward to say the least when it comes to dating boys in her school. But she doesn’t have to worry about school for the next two months since she’s spending the summer at her aunt Dwill’s lighthouse in Maine. What she does have to worry about is seeing ghosts in the lighthouse cemetery, having strange dreams, and hearing the voices of star-crossed lovers who lived two-hundred years ago. And then there’s a local boy named Zach Philbrook who works for her aunt. He’s too gorgeous for his own good. He’s also very tall, with midnight black hair, and the most beautiful indigo blue eyes Daphne has ever seen. Zach is treated like an outcast by the local teens in town. He’s Micmac and therefore not “one of the gang”. Daphne can’t help being drawn to his strength, especially considering that he’s had to live his entire life dealing with ignorance. But the local teens aren’t the only trouble-makers in town. As Zach and Daphne get closer, the lighthouse ghost lovers begin haunting them. When Daphne and Zach try to figure out how to fight them, the spirits get bolder and more dangerous.

EXCERPT:
The cemetery wasn’t far and wasn’t scary. Not to me. Just a scattering of old stones with ancient memories written on them. People long gone to another life and no one here who remembers them.I dropped my canvas shoulder bag of goods on the ground near the gate. Wrought iron and rusted, it leaned into the cemetery boundaries at a precarious angle. Thank God I didn’t have to push it open . . . I’d have probably landed on the ground with a rusted spiral in my gut.This place was unfamiliar to me, except in passing. Though I’d known of the cemetery’s existence, I’d never gone in. I had too much to do in the land of the living for my short time here. No one ever came out here, so what difference did the overgrowth make?Aunt begged to differ and insisted I clean the place up. The lighthouse was two hundred years old this summer, she reminded me, and the cemetery belonged to the lighthouse.So, on a bright June day, I found myself alone in a somewhat decrepit cemetery in a clearing in the woods. I made my way around the ancient stones in an attempt to put off the start of my project. Most were upright and clear enough of the tangle of brush that a portion of the inscription could be read.One small stone, nearly buried in the overgrown grass at the north corner, caught my eye. I flattened enough of the green to reveal the single word Sarah, and beneath it Age 3 Months.Sadness flashed through me, unexpectedly. There were babies buried here?I slipped the hand pruners from my back pocket where I’d stuck them and carefully snipped the grass down in front of the headstone. I pulled viney growth from the top corner of the stone, revealing a W. and a P.Sarah W.P.My hand cramped as I diligently snipped away at the grass, clearing the plot.The screech of the gate would have warned me . . . had the gate been in better repair. With its useless tilt, however, I never heard him coming. The bag dropping next to me on the mixed pile of living and dead debris announced his presence.I flipped to the side, tripping myself with my legs, but managed to keep the pruners in front of me. I pointed them into the air in front of my face.Blue-black eyes studied me, one hand hooked into his pants pocket by the thumb, the other paused in front of him, fingers splayed where it had dropped the bag.In books you always read about these moments. Crickets clicked, or birds called, or someone’s watch ticked, marking time. Maybe all three.In real life, the only thing you really hear until you recognize that person is your own heavy breathing, that being indicative of the fact that you are in the middle of nowhere with no possible help nearby.So how do you protect yourself from something that isn’t really there?

SYNOPSIS:
Linzie Russell raised her daughters with love, and was a devoted wife to her late husband. But, for the first time in her adult life, she is determined to live for herself.

Linzie fell in love with the Colorado Rockies years ago, while on a family vacation. So she decides to rent a cabin at the foot of the Rockies to study the culture that fascinates her, the Ute Native American Tribe.

But when she meets the owner of the cabin, she isn’t prepared for the passion that sparks into her life, or falling in love with a dynamic man.

AUTHOR BIO: Augusta Wright lives on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country where she writes novels and researches Native American history and culture.